Marco Bozzaris
At midnight, in his guarded tent,
The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power;
In dreams, through camp and court he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;
In dreams, his song of triumph heard;
Then wore his monarch’s signet-ring;
Then press’d that monarch’s throne—a king:
As wild his thoughts, as gay of wing,
As Eden’s garden bird.
At midnight in the forest shades,
Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band,
True as the steel of their tried blades,
Heroes in heart and hand.
There had the Persian’s thousands stood,
There had the glad earth drunk their blood,
On old Platæa’s day;
And now there breathed that haunted air
The sons of sires who conquer’d there,
With arm to strike, and soul to dare,
As quick, as far, as they.
An hour pass’d on: the Turk awoke:
That bright dream was his last.
He woke to hear his sentries shriek,
“To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!”
He woke, to die ’midst flame and smoke,
And shout, and groan, and sabre-stroke,
And death-shots falling thick and fast
As lightnings from the mountain cloud,
And heard, with voice as trumpet loud,
Bozzaris cheer his band:
“Strike!—till the last arm’d foe expires;
Strike!—for your altars and your fires;
Strike!—for the green graves of your sires;
God, and your native land!”
They fought like brave men, long and well;
They piled that ground with Moslem slain;
They conquer’d;—but Bozzaris fell,
Bleeding at every vein.
His few surviving comrades saw
His smile when rang their loud hurrah,
And the red field was won;
Then saw in death his eyelids close,
Calmly as to a night’s repose,—
Like flowers at set of sun.
Bozzaris! with the storied brave
Greece nurtured in her glory’s time,
Rest thee: there is no prouder grave,
Even in her own proud clime.
She wore no funeral weeds for thee,
Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume,
Like torn branch from death’s leafless tree,
In sorrow’s pomp and pageantry,
The heartless luxury of the tomb;
But she remembers thee as one
Long loved, and for a season gone;
For thee her poet’s lyre is wreathed;
Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
For thee she rings the birthday bells;
Of thee her babes’ first lisping tells;
For thee her evening prayer is said
At palace-couch and cottage-bed;
Her soldier, closing with the foe,
Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow;
His plighted maiden, when she fears
For him, the joy of her young years,
Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears;
And she, the mother of thy boys,
Though in her eye and faded cheek
Is read the grief she will not speak,
The memory of her buried joys,—
And even she who gave thee birth
Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,
Talk of thy doom without a sigh;
For thou art Freedom’s now, and Fame’s,
One of the few, th’ immortal names
That were not born to die.
Fitz-Greene Halleck.